Tag Archive: Luc Besson

So I really wanted Kevin Costner to be the next Liam Neeson. That man has just pumped out solid action movies ever since the first Taken film. Costner has really made a come back and I’ve always liked him. Here he plays a former CIA agent who finds out he only has several months to live. He chooses that time to try and reconnect with his estranged family in Paris. Problem is he’s approached by another CIA agent/femme fatale/weirdo played by Amber Heard. She has a new medical drug that can save him, he can have it if he kills off an arms dealer for her.

The film is produced by Luc Besson who I like and is directed by McG who has made at least one good movie(We Are Marshal) so things should have worked out. Sadly almost nothing works here, Costner tries and it’s fun watching him be a bad ass, problem is we don’t get enough of it. The largest action scene is in the first five minutes of the movie, then the film slows down and never picks back up. The film wanted to be a new age True Lies but instead is just a true mess. Hailee Steinfeld plays Costner’s daughter named Zoey. Their scenes together are decent but it’s not enough, it’s simply too generic. The film could have worked if the second plot were interesting at all, but sadly as an action film the movie just fails.

The biggest and weirdest flaw is Amber Heard, her character is not believable in any way. We’re told she’s a CIA operative, but at no time does it feel like it. Every time Costner sees her she’s dressed in the tightest dresses possible. Every scene she’s in is set in a weird 60’s Bond set which is never explained and takes you out of each of those scenes instantly. You start to feel real bad for her because she tries to simply over act herself out of this terrible character/script but she can never escape.

The main villains in this movie are throw away German/Generic European types. One if called “The Wolf” and in the beginning he’s trying to sell a dirty bomb but later we have no idea what he’s even doing. Every bad guy is wearing a black and white suit and Costner has no problem dispersing dozens of them at a time. This lack of a threat makes the action pointless and could make you care even less about the family element.

The obvious selling point for the script was that Costner’s character has no idea how to be a father, so as he tortures men to find “The Wolf” he stops to ask them for father advice. None of these scenes are funny or smart in any way. Basically you realize they are just stalling so the movie didn’t have a run time of forty minutes.